Businessweek recently posted an interview with Blizzard Entertainment's Rob Pardo about the company's world conquering MMORPG, World of Warcraft. Pardo discusses his creative process and the difficulties involved with feeding the voracious appetites of gamers eager for new content to devour.

To a certain extent, it’s a matter of limited raw materials – the imagination and willingness of top-level developers. He explains, “Someone might say ‘hey Blizzard why don’t you just hire 500 developers and do expansions every three months?’ Well, great developers don’t grow on trees. It’s also a content challenge for us [internally]. As a creative person, how long can you make WoW content when you’re ready for something else? So not only do we have to find a lot of people who are really talented and who are willing to do this, we have to take some time to think about the team so that they’re always challenged.”

I ask him if getting these expansions out on a regular basis is a matter of survival. After all, if gamers aren’t getting fresh content, they’ll start looking elsewhere and WoW’s subscriber base will dwindle. “Calling it a matter of survival makes it sound grim,” he says, “It’s more a matter of entertainment. Of course we want our gamers to stay in the world for as long as we can. But I look at this from the positive angle of us trying to entertain them. We’re trying to give them new experiences. One of my favorite analogies is how much an MMO is like a TV series. We’re developing episodes just like Lost or Seinfeld. We’re always trying to come up with something that’s true to the theory; that’s true to the content that people love; but that is new. From the moment that the series starts re-treading the same ground over and over again… well, that’s what we’re trying to avoid.”